Product Info

Platform

Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, iOS, Android

Publisher

Finji

Developer

Infinite Fall

Genre

Adventure, Platform

Players

1

File Size (Minimum)

6.92 GB

Release Date (NA)

Feb 21, 2017

Purchase From

eShop

PSN Store

Microsoft Store

Steam

Life sucks but there’s always home, a place where you are comfortable and familiar with… or so it seems. Don’t let Night in the Woods‘s serious-toned game with little action fool you; it’s heavily built on storytelling and it’s worth your time.

You’re Not Lost – You’re Here!

In the 21st century, a small Midwestern town called Possum Springs is suffering hard times. Once a big, copper mining town, the mining operations closed in the 1980s, and the community has been slowly decaying ever since. With unemployed rising, buildings being abandoned, and people leaving, Possum Springs is in peril.

In the world of Night in the Wood, the people are all humanoid animals: cats, birds, rats, etc. However, the game ironically shows normal-looking rats, cats, and dogs coexisting with the humanoids. Trippin’.

Meet Mae Borowski, a 20-year-old cat who dropped out of college (and for the majority of the game doesn’t explain why), struggles with identity issues, and is fearful about growing up. When she arrives at the transportation station, her parents forget to pick her up, so she ends up walking back home. During this time, players will get the jist on how to control Mae and how she interacts with the background, such as jumping on a tree branch multiple times and eventually falling down with it. Don’t worry though, Mae is picked up by the town’s police and taken back home.

Starting a new day back at home, Mae goes into town to meet her friends that she once hung out with, only to find out that they’ve grown up a bit with having jobs to pay bills, just like any Middle American today. She decides to hang out with them to help deal with her own issues.

Who Do You Hang Out With?

Mae’s friends still leave their schedules open for her on most nights — and sometimes during the day — to do some activities such as smashing a furnace with a baseball bat, breaking fluorescent light bulbs, visiting cemeteries, squirting water at people, or even gazing at the stars. Each activity is an unique mini-game that will give players something to do besides travelling across town.

Depending on who you hang out with will not only change some of the game’s narrative direction but the main story as well. You won’t be able to do everything with everyone, so you’ll have to choose wisely when it comes to what you want Mae to do. If you want to do everything, you’ll have to replay the game to achieve that friendship experience with characters such as Gregg and Bae.

Nightmare Eyes!!!

While there are times you have to pick and choose between who Mae should hang out with, there are some nights where everyone will get together for band practice, pizza, or even a bonfire with old classmates. During band practice, Mae will pick up her bass guitar and you’ll play a mini-game that’ll resembles Guitar Hero, hitting key notes coming down the screen with your controller’s buttons.

The game’s characters are uniquely different from each other and are a riot to interact with. Believe me: at the end, you’ll know that “Gregg rulz ok.”

Choose Your Words

When interacting with folks in the town of Possum Springs, Mae will be given multiple-choice answers and questions. While the choices you make won’t hinder your gaming experience, sometimes the options will open up other activities such as hanging out with secondary characters in the game and having more amusing conversations.

While Mae’s friends are “hard at work,” players can take Mae across the town to interact with the townsfolk, jump on power lines, steal food from a food stand to feed your pet rats, gaze into a telescope for stars, hop on a boat to scare off bats to find cool junk in the trolley tunnel, and much more. The game literally gives players many ways to play and interact with the game’s environment.

As Mae goes through a key activity, she’ll add it to her journal as a doodle. Each doodle is amusing and there are a lot of pages to fill, so don’t expect to finish the journal on the first playthrough. Players will have to replay the game if they want to see the missing Picasso drawings from Mae. If only the drawings could be transferred over to a new game after completing the story, it would make it easier to see them all.

Nightmare Fuel

Before bed, players can interact with Mae’s dad, practice the bass guitar (same mini-game that you play during band practice), play a computer game, or head to sleep. The computer game is a fun little hack-and-slash sprite game that is amusing at first but a bit repetitive.

On some nights, Mae will drift into a dream sequence that is hard to explain what is going on. Most of the time, you’ll have to explore a dark, secluded area in search of four musicians, and after finding them, return back to where Mae started in order to get out of the dream sequence, thereby waking up Mae.

The dreams don’t have quite a big impact on the game’s story, but they give Mae more depth psychologically, especially towards the end of the game. It’s seemingly more of a chore than an adventure, though, and players will find themselves trying to hurry through the sequence in order to start a new day.

Even though Night in the Woods is a relaxing, interactive game, there is a plot — one more serious than Mae’s identity issues. It’ll begin when Mae and the crew find a decapitated arm outside the diner — yes, you get to poke at it as a mini-game — and from there, the plot unfolds, revealing more and more as the days get closer to winter.

A Beautiful, Simple World

Night in the Woods is filled with vibrant colors and simple, detailed shapes that resemble the season of fall on point. When Mae runs through a patch of leaves, you can see the level of detail the developers put into this game as leaves and sticks fly off from Mae’s feet.

The soundtrack for the game fits smoothly with the tempo of the game. It’s smooth, soft, relaxing, and it fits the cool breeze of autumn in a small town called Possum Springs. Players will want to turn up the volume while playing.

Players will notice a lot of load times as Mae travels in-between scenes, and it can get a bit annoying. The most noticeable is when you start the game; you can expect to wait about thirty seconds for the game’s menu.

Summary

Night in the Woods is a powerful, story-driven game that shows that not all games need action if you have strong characters and fun mini-games. Oh and beating up a furnace with a bat is fun, too.

A Nintendo Switch review code was provided by Finji for this review.